The mean streets of Britain, where life is as cheap as food

The shootings in a Brixton McDonald’s were a terrible metaphor for the way we live now, writes Allister Heath. A whole section of society, raised on violence and fast food, is drifting away from the rest of the nation: nutrition is destiny Instead of the heavy police presence I had expected to find at Brixton’s underground station, I was greeted by a canned rendition of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. To cool tempers in the notoriously volatile south London hotspot, classical music is being pumped through the ticket hall’s sound system; unfortunately, like the flower power ‘make love, not war’ ideology of the 1960s, this latest gimmick is straight out of the politically correct rulebook.

Graffiti already disfigures the huge glass sign outside the newly refurbished station and dubious characters continue to congregate, oblivious to the banks of CCTV cameras. I turned left after leaving the station; it was the middle of the day but the air was already thick with menace. I had walked barely a dozen yards towards the Coldharbour Lane, now more closely associated with Yardie gangs than John Major, before being accosted by my first drug-dealer of the day: ‘skunk, crack, weed,’ he muttered under his breath. Seconds later, two more approached me.

I studiously avoided making eye contact. Instead, I looked over Brixton Road to the local branch of McDonald’s, where two youngsters were shot at point-blank range last week. Across Acre Lane, next to the Town Hall, is the Fridge, the nightclub outside which two men were sprayed with bullets last week and which was raided by 200 police officers in April. But it was the scene of the first shooting I had come to see: with its lurid combination of gun crime and seemingly random use of extreme violence, served up with huge helpings of unhealthy food, it epitomises everything that distinguishes today’s underclass from the rest; it illustrates how in our inner cities the devaluation of life has gone hand in hand with the devaluation of eating habits — even though McDonald’s is an honest company and is itself a victim of this trend.

Fortunately, nobody died in those shootings; and in terms of pure evil none of these attacks can match the horrendous massacres in America over the past few days, especially at the Amish school in Pennsylvania on Monday, when a deranged lone gunman sought out young girls from a classroom and killed them one after the other. There is outrage in the US, and the Bush administration will hold a school violence summit within days. The reaction in Britain has been quite different; the sense of shock so obvious on the other side of the Atlantic is palpably missing here, where nobody can even be bothered to call for yet another anticrime conference.

On the face of it, this lack of urgency is bizarre. In the UK in recent days we have suffered from an epidemic of gun and knife crime of such intensity that one murder or attempted killing simply melts into another. But while the violence still makes the head lines in newspapers and prominent slots in the TV bulletins, it no longer shocks a public numbed by the regularity of it all, and disillusioned by the apparent powerlessness of the authorities to do anything about it.

Americans know that crime can be tackled and they expect their politicians to do so. We don’t, and as a result Britain is suffering from an almost unprecedented outbreak of mindless violence. First of the latest batch of victims was a man shot in the stomach near the Old Kent Road in London; then Jason Gayle-Bent was pursued and stabbed in New Cross by a gang of 40 youths roaming the streets on bikes and firing shots into the air; 2,000 pupils in Peckham and East Dulwich were sent home because of a looming gang war between the Peckham Boys and the Ghetto Boys; a man was left paralysed after a shooting in Kennington; Carley Furness, 17, was stabbed in the neck in Orpington on Saturday; and on Sunday Stevens Nyembo-Ya-Muteba was stabbed to death in the stairwell of his Hackney flat after asking a group of youths to be quiet. In Nottingham, Nathan Williams, 17, was shot dead in a shopping centre. In Manchester, where an average of more than two firearm offences are committed by 15to 20-year-olds every day, 15-year-old Jessie James was recently shot dead in Moss Side and, in a separate attack, 25-year-old Mark Daniels suffered the same fate.

The sheer volume of these crimes guarantees that most will soon be forgotten by all but the victims’ loved ones. The public is frustrated and angry but also strangely resigned. The political classes, police and judiciary have failed to tackle the upsurge in lawlessness, which means that they are increasingly held in contempt by the public, who no longer believe that crime will ever be brought under control, regardless of who is in Downing Street.

The British underclass exists in a world of sink estates where welfare benefits, crime and the black market have become the settled lifestyle, providing a better standard of living than toiling in a minimum-wage job ever could. The problem here, therefore, is not principally material poverty: it is a lack of moral values and a rejection not only of work but also of family, marriage, manners, smart appearance and self-improvement. Millions now live in a cultural void, speaking their own private language, eating greasy fast food, watching trash TV, and listening to increasingly destructive music. These people are frighteningly uneducated and would never even dream of voting.

Young men have been robbed of their male role models as a result of broken homes. Their condition is made worse by permissive attitudes to crime, an unquestioning welfare state and an anti-family ideology. Instead of emerging as noble savages, freed from the shackles of civilisation, as followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have predicted, younger residents of our inner cities have ended up fuelling an explosion in crime, gang rule and a barbaric, Hobbesian war of all against all.

The victims of this terrible social experiment are living a life that in many respects is nasty, brutish and short. In Calton, a district of east Glasgow which epitomises the worst of underclass Britain, a boy born today can expect to live just 53.9 years, at least three decades less than someone born in London’s Kensington. In Glasgow as a whole, probably the worst affected city in the UK, life expectancy is 69, lower than that of Bosnia, Libya, Puerto Rico or even the Gaza Strip.

Calton residents are seven times more likely to die a drugs-related death than the rest of the country, 61 per cent have no qualifications and 37 per cent of children grow up in workless households. Around 57 per cent of adults do not work — and with only 8 per cent registered as unemployed, most are clearly content to live on benefits.

Because of their appalling diet, which often consists exclusively of crisps, chocolate and fizzy drinks, a quarter of Calton children are already obese before they reach school age. In west Glasgow, breastfeeding levels are 78 per cent in the most affluent areas, compared with 8.5 per cent in the most deprived areas. Hospital admissions for deliberate self-harm are ten times higher in the underclass areas than in the most affluent neighbourhoods. Close to 62 per cent of those in the most deprived areas of west Glasgow smoke, compared with 9.3 per cent in the richer parts; in poor parts of east Glasgow, 35 per cent of pregnant women smoke, with devastating effects on their unborn children. Rates of coronary heart disease, stroke and lung cancer are also much higher among the underclass.

Of all the shootings of the past few days, those in the Brixton McDonald’s were the most significant because they highlighted this dramatic divergence between the habits and values of the modern, health-obsessed, metropolitan middle classes and those of the underclass. The two groups now live in completely different worlds. The two young victims apparently had a minor disagreement with another youngster, perhaps merely because they had trodden on his toes; he felt ‘disrespected’, it seems, and responded with his semi-automatic weapon — presumably in the way he imagined his television or gangsta rap role model would have done. That the restaurant was packed with local teenagers and families at the time didn’t bother the gunman, who evidently did not consider that others may be equally deserving of the ‘respect’ he so craves.

The setting of the attack is also deeply symbolic. When McDonald’s was booming in Britain in the 1980s, despite a residual anti-American snootiness, many younger middle-class people saw it as a cheeky, naughty indulgence to which they would happily take their children. Eating at McDonald’s soon became a classless phenomenon — rich and poor kids alike happily tucked into their Happy Meals and collected their plastic toys.

This picture has changed drastically during the past few years, as increased affluence, the emergence of obesity as a major health problem, the cult of Jamie Oliver and shifting political values have driven a middle-class eating revolution. Organic food, once the preserve of bearded eco-warriors, has gone mainstream; the better-off began to turn their backs on fast food and flocked instead to Waitrose to buy smoothies and sushi. One might call this David Cameron’s Britain.

The tipping point came with Morgan Spurlock’s influential propaganda film, Super Size Me, which, it must be said, unfairly demonised McDonald’s. Eating habits went from being a matter of taste to a question of morality, a shift reinforced by Jamie Oliver’s campaign against the dreadful diet in state schools. Despite its healthier menus, McDonald’s has increasingly become a nogo area for the middle classes, a trend that started long before last week’s gun attack in Brixton. But now the rise of a generation of gun-toting, trigger-happy, amoral burgerand-fries-munching yobs who select their victims in the same mindless way as they stuff their faces will only reinforce this exodus.

In today’s Britain, where eating habits are taking over from accents as a sign of class, the combination of bad food and violence is proving a troubling and toxic one. The problems of the underclass, while monumental, are not intractable, but would require extraordinary political will to put right, including a market-led revolution in education, a dramatic reform in welfare to make work pay, the removal of the incentives for family breakdown, a much tougher ‘broken windows’ strategy for policing, and a changed cultural message that promotes decency and respect. The tragedy is that as long as the Cameron generation continue to congratulate themselves over their organic food and holier-than-thou smoothies, the chances of them ever doing anything about the catastrophic conditions endured by the other half are extremely slim. But if they insulate themselves further from the reality of life in the inner cities, while continuing to tolerate the failings of the welfare state, it is the middle class that will deserve the blame for the disaster on their doorsteps.

Allister Heath is associate editor of The Spectator and deputy editor of the Business.